After a year defined by volatility, optimism, and strategic recalibration, enterprise IT spending closed 2025 with just +3.2% growth, a sobering retreat from the +5.3% projected at the start of the year. For many technology leaders, 2025 became a year of balancing ambition against uncertainty, with priorities shifting from expansion to efficiency.
Yet beneath the surface of budget cuts and recalibrated forecasts, another story unfolded: one of innovation driven by necessity. As artificial intelligence moved from hype to real-world implementation, enterprise leaders found themselves reimagining not just what they spend, but how they work.
To bring more context to these shifts, ETR convened a Macro Views Panel. This group of enterprise IT executives, CISOs, and data leaders joined ETR analysts to discuss the findings from each quarter’s survey. Their perspectives, layered with ETR’s quantitative data, provide a candid look at how technology leaders navigated one of the most unpredictable years in recent memory.
The ETR Macro Views Survey and companion panel discussion capture these shifting dynamics across four pivotal quarters, revealing how organizations managed turbulence, adapted to new realities, and laid groundwork for a cautious yet promising 2026.
By April, that projection fell to +3.4%, as macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures from tariff shifts to inflation forced organizations to revise spending plans downward. July brought a slight uptick to +3.6%, thanks to renewed project activity, but the October data sealed the trend: final 2025 growth settled at +3.2%, the lowest since 2H’23.
The pattern was clear: technology budgets were still expanding, but more selectively. Large enterprises, including Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations, posted the slowest growth at just +2.8% to +3.0%, while smaller and midsize firms proved more agile, preserving higher rates of investment.
Much of this restraint reflected a global mood of caution. Tariffs, supply chain disruptions, and fluctuating currency markets became boardroom talking points. As a director of IT, data science, and analytics for a large retail/consumer enterprise explained: “...we’re monitoring on daily—if not hourly—developments on the tariffs, every tick of inflation, and supply chain. Operational situational awareness is an incredibly important part of our daily routine. All of this has led to increasing or heightened focus on controllable expense. Technical debt was just mentioned—what initiatives have to be pushed ahead, what can be shelved, where cloud expense can be reeled in, and where it has to continue. All of these things are part of our daily conversation.”
In previous cycles, executives led with optimism. But 2025 marked a turning point. The C-suite’s confidence declined for the fourth straight survey, aligning closer to mid-management sentiment.
A VP of IT Security for a large business services organization summarized the shift, “We’re gravitating towards more predictability in just a lot of our thought and decision-making. Meaning in the past we, up to this point, had been focused more on just business capabilities than a lot of the modernization and paying off technical debt. Those were things that were secondary. But really, what we’re looking for now is flexibility, and being able to pivot very quickly to something that’s predictable.”
That mindset has become the blueprint for 2026 planning. Executives are no longer betting on unrestrained expansion; they’re investing in adaptability by building leaner vendor ecosystems, balancing cloud and on-prem strategies, and revisiting automation’s ROI.
Staffing remains a sensitive lever. Twenty-seven percent of respondents cited reducing staffing costs as their primary method of decreasing IT spend, the highest level in over a year. Yet even as headcount decisions tighten, technology priorities, particularly around cybersecurity and AI, remain insulated.
A global chief Information security officer for a large energy/utilities company explained, "Then of course, if you’re not investing, you’re either reducing or trying to find ways to save somewhere else. Definitely staffing costs, consolidation, licensing costs, and looking at outsourcing in even cheaper areas—moving outsourcing from maybe India to Asia, or even further east. I think a lot of organizations are looking at pretty much every opportunity and option that they have to reduce their overall spend on IT. Except I would say in one area, and that’s in cyber. Cyber still seems to be somewhat protected from reduction."
This marks a significant shift from early 2025, when only about half of respondents described their AI adoption as “measured” rather than operational. Now, AI isn’t a future initiative; it’s part of daily workflows.
The Fall survey also revealed an even split in AI strategy: 29% of organizations use models directly from AI developers, 29% rely on embedded models from vendors, and 21% pursue both. Data engineering teams favored building, while security organizations leaned toward vendor-integrated solutions.
Still, the return on investment remains elusive. Only 13% of respondents reported achieving measurable ROI at scale, although Global 2000 firms showed stronger outcomes when developing in-house models.
While many are not seeing ROI from their AI investment, the global chief Information security officer offered a pragmatic view based on what his company is seeing, “AI isn’t replacing staff, we see it as a supplement. It’s in addition that helps you do what you do on a daily basis. You can review things faster, you can get the executive summaries, and you can craft an email much quicker.”
This theme—AI as an accelerator, not a replacement—echoes across the data. As leaders refine governance and trust frameworks, 2026 will test who can operationalize AI safely and strategically.
Despite fatigue from a turbulent year, technology leaders aren’t standing still. The initial forecast for 2026 shows +4.0% IT spending growth, signaling cautious recovery.
The optimism is concentrated among Midsize and Small enterprises, which benefit from faster decision-making and fewer geopolitical dependencies. Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations remain measured, prioritizing cost discipline and return on investment over raw expansion.
Regions show divergence as well: North America projects modest improvement, while APAC and Latin America express higher optimism, buoyed by infrastructure and AI-driven modernization initiatives.
Yet this “guarded optimism” rests on an evolved playbook. Spending intent favors operational resilience, cybersecurity, and data infrastructure over new vendor adoption. Across industries, “efficiency-first innovation” is emerging as the dominant strategy, optimizing cloud footprints, consolidating redundant tools, and using AI to extract more from existing assets.
If 2025 taught enterprise leaders anything, it’s that volatility rewards agility. Spending growth slowed, but transformation didn’t stop. The most successful organizations reframed the year not as contraction, but as calibration.
Heading into 2026, efficiency and accountability will be the currencies of enterprise success. C-suites are setting realistic targets, mid-level managers are prioritizing automation, and data-driven governance is becoming non-negotiable. AI, cybersecurity, and operational resilience are no longer separate conversations; they’re the foundation of the new enterprise architecture.
As the Macro Views data show, adaptability has replaced optimism as the leading indicator of enterprise strength. The challenge for technology leaders now isn’t to grow faster; it’s to grow smarter.
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